北京师范大学认知神经科学与学习国家重点实验室宋宜颖和刘嘉老师于2010年7月在Journal of Neuroscience上发表了文章。
齐国晏子出使楚国，楚王为羞辱他，在宴席中押出一名齐国的罪犯，并刁难晏子说，“齐人固善盗乎？”晏子回答道：“橘生淮南则为橘，生于淮北则为枳，叶徒相似，其实味不同。所以然者何？水土异也。”这里，晏子利用环境对人行为的影响巧妙地回答了楚王的刁难，即同一个人，在不同的环境，其行为不同。晏子的这个观察，得到了后来大量心理学行为研究的实证。
但是，不同的环境和经验对大脑功能，特别是对我们基本的客体识别能力，是不是也有不同的塑造作用呢？该研究利用磁共振脑成像技术比较同一组客体经过两种学习任务在大脑产生的学习效应。结果发现，把训练刺激与英文单词对应起来进行联合学习，在视觉单词形状区（VWFA）对训练刺激的反应增强；而分辨形状的知觉学习则在参与物体形状加工的脑区产生了学习效应。这样的结果表明，视觉经验对大脑的塑造作用不仅取决于学习过程中学的是什么，也取决于以何种方式学习。
该研究对于理解客体识别的神经机制以及经验对客体识别的调制具有重要意义。
推荐英文摘要：
The Journal of Neuroscience doi:10.1523/JNEUROSCI.0140-10.2010
The Role of Top-Down Task Context in Learning to Perceive Objects
Yiying Song,1,2 Siyuan Hu,1,2 Xueting Li,1 Wu Li,1 and Jia Liu1,2
1State Key Laboratory of Cognitive Neuroscience and Learning, Beijing Normal University, Beijing 100875, China and 2Graduate University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100049, China
In high-level perceptual regions of the ventral visual pathway in humans, experience shapes the functional properties of the cortex: the fusiform face area responds most strongly to faces of familiar rather than unfamiliar races, and the visual word form area (VWFA) is tuned only to familiar orthographies. But are these regions affected only by the bottom-up stimulus information they receive during learning, or does the effect of perceptual experience depend on the way that stimulus information is used during learning? Here, we test the hypothesis that top-down influences (i.e., task context) modulate the effect of perceptual experience on functional selectivities of the high-level visual cortex. Specifically, we test whether experience with novel visual stimuli produces a greater effect on the VWFA when those stimuli are associated with meanings (via association learning) but produces a greater effect on shape-processing regions when trained in a discrimination task without associated meanings. Our result supports this hypothesis and further shows that learning is transferred to novel objects that share parts with the trained objects. Thus, the effects of experience on selectivities of the high-level visual cortex depend on the task context in which that experience occurs and the perceptual processing strategy by which objects are encoded during learning.
